It is the business of the poet so to construct his line that the intention must be caught at once. Even when these men have precisely the same understanding of a sentence, they differ, and often widely, in their modes of enunciating it. Any one who has taken the trouble to examine the topic of emphasis (by which I here mean not accent of particular syllables, but the dwelling on entire words), must have seen that men emphasize in the most singularly arbitrary manner. There are certain large classes of people, for example, who persist in emphasizing their monosyllables. Little uniformity of emphasis prevails; because the thing itself – the idea, emphasis – is referable to no natural, at least to no well-comprehended and therefore uniform, law. Beyond a very narrow and vague limit, the whole matter is conventionality. And if we differ in emphasis even when we agree in comprehension, how much more so in the former when in the latter too! Apart, however, from the consideration of natural disagreement, is it not clear that, by tripping here and mouthing there, any sequence of words may be twisted into any species of rhythm? But are we thence to deduce that all sequences of words are rhythmical in a rational understanding of the term? – for this is the deduction, precisely to which the reductio ad absurdum will, in the end, bring all the propositions of Coleridge. Out of a hundred readers of »Christabel,« fifty will be able to make nothing of its rhythm, while forty-nine of the remaining fifty will, with some ado, fancy they comprehend it, after the fourth or fifth perusal. The one out of the whole hundred who shall both comprehend and admire it at first sight must be an unaccountably clever person – and I am by far too modest to assume, for a moment, that that very clever person is myself.

In illustration of what is here advanced I cannot do better than quote a poem:

 

Pease porridge hot – pease porridge cold –

Pease porridge in the pot – nine days old.

 

Now those of my readers who have never heard this poem pronounced according to the nursery conventionality, will find its rhythm as obscure as an explanatory note; while those who have heard it, will divide it thus, declare it musical, and wonder how there can be any doubt about it.

 

Pease | porridge | hot | pease | porridge | cold |

Pease | porridge | in the | pot | nine | days | old. |

 

The chief thing in the way of this species of rhythm, is the necessity which it imposes upon the poet of travelling in constant company with his compositions, so as to be ready, at a moment's notice, to avail himself of a well understood poetical license – that of reading aloud one's own doggerel.

In Mr. Cranch's line,

 

Many are the | thoughts that | come to | me, |

 

the general error of which I speak is, of course, very partially exemplified, and the purpose for which, chiefly, I cite it, lies yet farther on in our topic.

The two divisions (thoughts that) and (come to) are ordinary trochees. Of the last division (me) we will talk hereafter. The first division (many are the) would be thus accented by the Greek prosodies (many are the) and would be called by them astrologos. The Latin books would style the foot Pœon Primus, and both Greek and Latin would swear that it was composed of a trochee and what they term a pyrrhic – that is to say, a foot of two short syllables – a thing that cannot be, as I shall presently show.

But now, there is an obvious difficulty. The astrologos, according to the prosodies' own showing, is equal to five short syllables, and the trochee to three – yet, in the line quoted, these two feet are equal. They occupy precisely the same time. In fact, the whole music of the line depends upon their being made to occupy the same time. The prosodies then, have demonstrated what all mathematicians have stupidly failed in demonstrating – that three and five are one and the same thing.

After what I have already said, however, about the bastard trochee and the bastard iambus, no one can have any trouble in understanding that many are the is of similar character. It is merely a bolder variation than usual from the routine of trochees, and introduces to the bastard trochee one additional syllable. But this syllable is not short. That is, it is not short in the sense of ›short‹ as applied to the final syllable of the ordinary trochee, where the word means merely the half of long.

In this case (that of the additional syllable), ›short,‹ if used at all, must be used in the sense of the sixth of long. And all the three final syllables can be called short only with the same understanding of the term. The three together are equal only to the one short syllable (whose place they supply) of the ordinary trochee. It follows that there is no sense in thus () accenting these syllables. We must devise for them some new character which shall denote the sixth of long. Let it be (Bild ) – the crescent placed with the curve to the left. The whole foot (many are the) might be called a quick trochee.

We come now to the final division (me) of Mr. Cranch's line. It is clear that this foot, short as it appears, is fully equal in time to each of the preceding. It is in fact the cæsura – the foot which, in the beginning of this paper, I called the most important in all verse.